I’ll be redeeming myself in Harold and Kumar. I don’t know about you two.
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Last week, we had the number one seed in the East for the greatest so-bad-its-good movie: Xanadu.
This week, the number one seed in the North: Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers was actually an interesting book, written by a libertarian but denounced as totalitarian. The book raises a number of interesting questions about the obligation of the individual to the state and whether citizenship should be earned rather than automatically granted.
Forget all of that in the movie though, this movie should have been called 90210 Pretty Kids vs. The Giant Space Roaches from Hell.
You get it all in this one folks: violence galore, hearbreak and drama, arms and legs chopped off by cgi bug-monsters, casual use of tactical nuclear weapons, Doogie Hauser MD as a pyschic kid who dresses like a Gestapo agent, and more. Did I mention violence?
So the basic plot is that humanity fights a war against a race of killer bugs from outer space. It’s kill or be killed pretty kids, so wipe them all out! The movie is moved along by a series of faux war propaganda pieces. In this one, you more or less get the beginning of the film:
Hollywood cheese galore is worked into the plot, including a romantic triangle or two and a high-school teacher turned psychopath alien killer. Life is too short not to watch movies like this, that is if you like movies about Dawson’s Creek trying to wipe out an entire species with machine guns and nukes.
Wonderful movie. Up there with Flash Gordon in my book.
I’ve found that some people don’t quite get the fact that the director is dis’ing Heinlein.
Scary how the propaganda sequences in the film compares to Fox News and the Iraq war.
I’m going to be a bit ridiculous here by taking the movie seriously for a minute and piont out something that “bugs” me about the plot. The big climax is when they find the “thinking” bug, which most people argue can’t possibly exist because bugs can’t think. But, if bugs can’t think then how did they 1) decide to attack earth (let alone know there were beings on other planets) 2) learn to control and target meteors to use them as weapons? Craziness like this is why it is now the number 1 seed in the North.